Karoo captures your soul hot, harsh, unforgiving – yet uniquely beguiling

When I hear people waxing lyrical about their unconditional love for the Karoo, I am sometimes tempted to force them to tell the whole truth … that the Karoo is a beautiful place for a few hours around sunrise in the morning and the same around sunset.

The rest of the day can be a bleak firepit when the harsh glare from the sun accentuates the fact that it is a desert and a seemingly barren place.

We arrive at the SA National Parks’ Karoo National Park outside the Northern Cape town of Beaufort West just before 4pm, expecting that it is going to be hot but still gut-punched by the reality of 42°C under a cloudless sky.

Our one-bedroom chalet has a small patio which feels like an oven and, inside, the only sign I can see of the promised air conditioning is a ceiling fan.

Just as I am about to burst a blood vessel about misleading advertising, I realise there is an aircon – and a very good one at that – in the bedroom.

I do tend to be a bit like this… so let me add at this juncture that I did get my wife’s by now familiar rolled eyes.

The heat has barely dropped when we decide to pop out for a drive before sunset.

We’ve been here before but treated it as a layover on the way to Cape Town and can recall very little of the place.

This time, we’ve added an extra night to take in as much as we can. The map shows a swimming pool near the park boundary, about 10km away, so we head there.

And it is beautiful – sparkling blue and with thick green grass under the shady trees. An oasis, really.

Except… Except for the ants which swarm everywhere. Apparently, the way to deal with them is not to step on them because then everybody shows up for the funeral and they can get nasty and bite you.

No wonder there are no guests lounging on the beautiful grass.

We don’t spend long, hopping back to the car to escape them and reclaim our automotive aircon. Not an auspicious start to the visit.

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A magical wilderness experience

But as we sit on the patio, still sweating and the bats fly out from our roof (yes, really) into the descending darkness, I can feel my apology building.

With the magnificent mountains ringing the rest camp being etched first in late afternoon sunlight and then bathed in an almost purple sunset afterglow, the Karoo reaches out to touch, and then steal, your soul.

The twin lunacies of Donald Trump and the ANC belong to a different world as you realise this view is millennia old… and unchanged. We humans are foolish, frivolous specks when compared to the majesty of nature.

It is not difficult to get philosophical or even wax poetic in a place like this. And besides, I’ve chucked a few blocks of ice in my red wine (don’t try the room temperature nonsense out here) and the temperature is slowly subsiding. And, of course, the aircon creates a whole new world of luxury inside later.

Karoo National Park is probably the best run SANParks establishment we’ve visited in recent years: staff are efficient and very friendly, and everything in the chalets and the camp looks like it is in tip-top shape.

We pay just on R1 600 a night for the two of us, which is on the steep side for a self-catering unit – until we realise this charge includes breakfast, served from 7 to 10.30am at the camp restaurant.

We get to that late because our morning drive almost turns into a mourning drive.

A long and spectacular pass takes us to the top of the hills along tar and then rutted and stone-strewn gravel roads.

Even though I don’t venture down the full-on 4×4 tracks – though I could, because we are in a top-of-the-range Ford Everest – I feel confident enough to push things a little too hard.

The resultant puncture costs us about an hour (because I initially have no idea what I am doingand have to, slowly, figure it out) but we still manage to get back in time for breakfast.

And surprisingly good it is – what you’d expect in a country hotel, I’d say. The drive, though, was worth it, we decide as – bellies full – we wobble back to the chalet after breakfast.

You don’t see a lot of wildlife in the park – this is not Kruger, after all – but what there is memorable. Like the majestic gemsbok (oryx for those who haven’t spent time in Namibia) standing on a crag, silhouetted against the azure sky.

Or the klipspringer, standing proud on a high ledge, king of his high frontier. On the drive, vistas open up suddenly around corners and the space seems endless. We stop at places to take pictures and to peer down into rugged gorges.

It’s just what we love… but perhaps if we’d loved breakfast a little less, we would have not been bothered about getting back and wouldn’t have been travelling too fast for the conditions.

The Karoo’s timelessness

Life’s about lessons, so they say… That evening, as the braai fire flickers into embers, we sit on the patio and look up at stars which are really living the cliché about being so close you feel you could reach out and touch them.

Out come the books – which is one of our favourite holiday occupations – and there are few places we’d rather be. In all the time there, we don’t switch on the TV.

Who cares about a limited DStv bouquet anyway, when you have your own reality show right here?

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